Is There a Better Way to Assess Causation?

Julia: I got superinterested in this topic when judea pearl's book came out, called the book of y i actually have a copy of it, i think it's probably still sitting on my bedside table. And if there's a better way to do that, where you can look retrospectively, instead of needing to design an experiment to assess causality, it certainly would be very powerful. Yes, i have some very smart friends in research departments at organizations like net flicks and microsopt and i have to believe that this is what they do all day long. But i just have to trust that they know something about the data that i can't interpret myself.